Stardust

So it was to Scaithe’s Ebb that Lord Primus of Stormhold came one night, all dressed in black with a beard as thick and serious as one of the storks’ nests in the town’s chimneys. He came in a carriage drawn by four black horses and he took a room in the Seaman’s Rest on Crook Street.

He was considered most peculiar in his needs and requests, for he brought his own food and drink into his rooms, and kept it locked in a wooden chest, which he would only open to take himself an apple, or a wedge of cheese, or a cup of pepper-wine. His was the topmost room in the Seaman’s Rest, a high and spindly building built on a rocky outcrop to facilitate smuggling.

He bribed a number of the local street urchins to report to him the moment they saw any fellow they did not know come to town, by land or sea; in particular, they were to look for a very tall, angular, dark-haired fellow, with a thin hungry face and blank eyes.

“Primus is certainly learning caution,” said Secundus to his four other dead brothers.

“Well, you know what they say,” whispered Quintus, in the wistful tones of the dead, which sounded, on that day, like the lapping of distant waves upon the shingle, “a man who is tired of looking over his shoulder for Septimus is tired of life.”In the mornings, Primus would talk to the sea captains with ships in Scaithe’s Ebb, buying them grog liberally, but neither drinking nor eating with them. In the afternoon he would inspect the ships in the docks.

Soon the gossips of Scaithe’s Ebb (and there were many) had the gist and juice of it all: the bearded gentleman was to be taking ship to the East. And this tale was soon chased by another, that he would be sailing out on the Heart of a Dream under Captain Yann, a black-trimmed ship with its decks painted crimson red, of more or less savory reputation (by which I mean that it was generally held that she kept her piracies for distant waters) and this would be happening as soon as he gave the word.

“Good master!” said a street urchin to Lord Primus. “There’s a man in town, come by land. He lodges with Mistress Pettier. He is thin and crowlike, and I saw him in the Ocean’s Roar, buying grog for every man in the room. He says he is a distressed seafaring man, seeking a berth.”Primus patted the boy’s filthy head and handed him a coin.

Then he returned to his preparations, and that afternoon it was announced that the Heart of a Dream would leave harbor in three short days.

The day before the Heart of a Dream was to set sail, Primus was seen to sell his coach and four horses to the stableman on Wardle Street, after which he walked down to the quay, dispensing small coins to the urchins. He entered his cabin in the Heart of a Dream and gave strict orders that none was to disturb him, for any reason, good or bad, until they were at least a week out of port.

That evening an unfortunate accident befell an able seaman who had crewed the rigging on the Heart of a Dream. He fell, when drunk, on the slippery cobblestones of Revenue Street, and broke his hip. Luckily there was a replacement at the ready: the very sailor with whom he had been drinking that evening, and to whom the injured man had been persuaded to demonstrate a particularly complicated hornpipe step on the wet cobbles. And this sailor, tall, dark and crow-like, marked his ship’s papers with a circle that night and was on deck at dawn when the ship sailed out of the harbor in the morning mist. The Heart of a Dream sailed east.

Lord Primus of Stormhold, his beard freshly shaven, watched it sail from the cliff top until it was lost to view. Then he walked down to Wardle Street, where he returned the stableman’s money and something more besides, and he rode off on the coast road toward the west in a dark coach pulled by four black horses. It was an obvious solution. After all, the unicorn had been ambling hugely behind them for most of the morning, occasionally nudging the star’s shoulder with its big forehead. The wounds on its dappled flanks, which had blossomed like red flowers under the lion’s claws the day before, were now dried to brown and scabbed over.

The star limped and hobbled and stumbled, and Tristran walked beside her, cold chain binding wrist to wrist.

On the one hand,Tristran felt there was something almost sacrilegious about the idea of riding the unicorn: it was not a horse, did not subscribe to any of the ancient pacts between Man and Horse. There was a wildness in its black eyes and a twisting spring to its step which was dangerous and untamed. On the other hand, Tristran had begun to feel, in a way that he could not articulate, that the unicorn cared about the star and wished to help her. So he said, “Look, I know all that stuff about frustrating my plans every step of the way, but if the unicorn is willing, perhaps it would carry you on its back for a little way.”The star said nothing.

“Well?”She shrugged.

Tristran turned to the unicorn, stared into its pool-black eyes. “Can you understand me?” he asked. It said nothing. He had hoped it would nod its head or stamp a hoof, like a trained horse he had once seen on the village green when he was younger. But it simply stared. “Will you carry the lady? Please?”The beast said not a word, nor did it nod or stamp. But it walked to the star, and it knelt down at her feet.

Tristran helped the star onto the unicorn’s back. She grasped its tangled mane with both hands and sat sidesaddle upon it, her broken leg sticking out. And that was how they traveled for some hours.

Tristran walked along beside them, carrying her crutch over his shoulder, with his bag dangling from the end. He found it as hard to travel with the star riding the unicorn as it had been before. Then he had been forced to walk slowly, trying to keep pace with the star’s limping hobble — now he was hurrying to keep up with the unicorn, nervous lest the unicorn should get too far ahead and the chain that linked them both should pull the star from the beast’s back. His stomach rumbled as he walked. He was painfully aware how hungry he was; soon Tristran began to think of himself as nothing more than hunger, thinly surrounded by flesh, and, as fast as he could, walking, walking... He stumbled and knew that he was going to fall.

“Please, stop,” he gasped.

The unicorn slowed, and stopped. The star looked down at him. Then she made a face and shook her head. “You had better come up here, too,” she said. “If the unicorn will let you. Otherwise you’ll just faint or something, and drag me onto the ground with you. And we need to go somewhere so that you can get food.”Tristran nodded gratefully.

The unicorn appeared to offer no opposition, waiting, passively, so Tristran attempted to clamber up onto it. It was like climbing a sheer wall, and as fruitless. Eventually Tristran led the animal over to a beech tree that had been uprooted several years before by a storm, or a high wind, or an irritable giant, and, holding his bag and the star’s crutch, he scrambled up the roots onto the trunk, and from there onto the back of the unicorn.